You CAN put crisp packets in recycling

...Or at least you’ll soon be able to, thanks to Morrisons’ Scots plant

IT’S a conversation that regularly leaves families across the country scratching their heads.

Can you put bread bags, crisps packets and pizza wrappers in with recycling? Or should they go in the ordinary rubbish bin?

Now Morrisons hopes to have solved the conundrum – by collecting all types of soft plastic we use at home and sending it to its Fifebased recycling plant.

The supermarket says it will turn around 15,000 tons of hard-to-recycle waste packaging a year into plastic flakes, pellets and boards for use in fixtures and fittings in Morrisons stores or in the building and agriculture trades.

At first, customers will have to bring their washed soft plastic into Morrisons stores in carrier bags. But chief executive David Potts told The Mail on Sunday that the company is working with local councils to find a way of collecting soft plastic materials from household doorsteps across the country.

Currently, most councils recycle only hard plastics, which are more valuable and easier to turn into new products. The Morrisons initiative, being trialled in six Edinburgh stores, is set to be rolled out across all the company’s 498 shops over the next year if the pilot scheme is successful.

Mr Potts said: ‘We’ve all seen the terrible pictures of plastic on beautiful Indonesian and Philippine beaches. And I’ve seen first-hand how it is affecting our coastlines when I’ve spent time on beachcleans here in Britain.

‘We’ve all come a long way towards turning the tide on plastics but it’s not enough. We need to turn our attention to soft plastics.’

The UK uses around 150 million tons of soft plastics every year. However, until recently the technology did not exist to recycle these types of plastic. As a result, the plastic has often ended up incinerated, on landfill sites or exported to the developing world.

Mr Potts said Morrisons will be ‘literally building shops out of the plastic we recycle’ by using the socalled Ecosheets created at its Fife plant instead of plywood.

l Read more about why Morrisons wants to revolutionise plastic recycling at mailonsunday.co.uk/potts